GrumbleSmiles

 The Last Laugh Looney Party will now move on to examine the private club for lawyers, otherwise known as the Ministry of Justice.

OPENING ARGUMENT:-

• Justice takes too long to deliver.
• Legal aid is a gravy train for lawyers.
• Reduced sentences are justice denied.
• Too many prisoners reoffend.
• Just doing time for a crime is not enough redress.
• Proceeds of crime and substantial damages for victims should be fully repaid before release.

SOME FACTS :-

• The MoJ costs £ 8.1 billion annually.
• There are 25,000 people in prison.
• 10,000 Offenders are  on probation serving community sentences.
• There are 22,000 prison officers.
• 3456 probation officers.
• 6543 staff at MoJ.
• a zillion lawyers making a mint.

LLLP script for Bodj TV broadcast :-

“I am going to be the next great prison reformer.   Prisoners must pay for their crimes.   Literally !      £5,000 for shoplifting;  £10,000 for each burglary ;  £100,000 for GBH ;   £1,000,000 for murder ;  etc.     On top of this they must pay for their hotel stay in our luxurious prisons …… and compensate their victims.
They will be paid minimum wage when serving their time, but they will be expected to work at all the jobs nobody else wants to do :- sorting our waste; recycling our nuclear waste somehow; untieing knots in string; tieing knots in string;  cleaning graffiti off walls ( except for Banksy ).    When they have finished their term, they will then have to do a years voluntary service to pay their debt to society.”

“ A year or two of this and I expect there to be a lot less crime.   Then we will be able to do without most of the lawyers”

FORECAST SAVING :    £ 9.2 billion.

This is yet another Government Department the Last Laugh Looney Party has been asked to look into by Prime Minister Bodj.
The Department of  Digital, Culture, Media and Sport just sounds like a jolly for politicians.     They get tickets for football matches,  Concerts, film premiers, they even get to go in the Royal box at Wimbolden.    Strange how they are all avid sports fans ?
They get the best seats at cultural events.   TV appearances are not always fun because they often get asked question they can’t answer 😀

They also get to go on lots of free trips abroad to promote British culture in Abu Dhabi, Australia, Italy and Jamaica and other sunny places.     They also had to go to Japan, Australia and other far off places.    If fact they spent £ 24 million on travel and subsistence in the year.     Still it is only money !

This  mind map type illustration is taken from their 2018/19 Annual Report

It sums up in one picture just how confused the DCMS really is !   If you can’t read it don’t worry it doesn’t help you understand what they do with our money or the freebies.

The LLLP recommendation to Bodj is “ Shut them down immediately before they create any more mayhem !     Make National Museums and galleries charge entry fees with concessions  for children and  the elderly.    Make the BBC  pay it’s way in full, even if that means shutting down BBC3 and BBC4 and halving Gary Linaker’s salary.       Do you agree? ”

Forecast result

Disagree                  —— 27%

Agree                        ——-65%

Couldn’t care less    —— 8%

FORECAST SAVING.   £ 7.2 billion 

This Last Laugh Looney Party is still on its relentless search to find out what Central Government Departments are upto with our money.

Our attention has turned to the mysteriously named “BEIS”.    It doesn’t even call itself a Department.     Headed up by Alok Sharma it sounds like the next James Bond movie.   It seems to be a hotch-potch of odds and ends that don’t fit in to other areas or maybe nobody wants to handle.   It is a hastily put together grouping that only cost a mere £ 7.5 billion. 
As well as its Secretary of State, it has five Government Ministers, who are supported by a Permanent Secretary,  who is assisted by 7 Director Generals, who in turn have 40 Directors and a total of 3,776 staff.   So they must be doing very, very important work on our behalf.      Strange that we don’t hear much about them, I guess it must be hush hush !

At the last count they had taken on more staff probably to cope with leaving the European Union— they now have 4,420 staff.   Although it is a lot more than that, because they are full time equivalents (FTE’s) , meaning there are a lot of part-time staff who are grouped together as FTE’s to make the numbers look smaller.     But it it even more deceitful than that, because on top of the 4,420 staff there are another 14,260 in ALB,s ( arms length bodies) like the Met Office.

Their title stands for “ Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ”.     That is probably why they are keeping their heads down, because we are not doing too well on that front :-

• Business’s have been locked down due to Coronapop and many will find it hard to reopen ever again.
• Energy costs have risen and our coal mines have all been shut down, our North Sea oil is running out and our Nuclear Power stations are past their sell by dates.    Let’s hope the wind blows and the sun shines a lot in the years ahead.
• Industrial Strategy is not really needed when you don’t have much industry left.

Here is the LLLP script for tonight’s Boris broadcast :-

“The BEIS has worked tirelessly for the last few years closing down industry, increasing energy costs and locking down businesses.    I am very proud of what they have achieved,  but maybe before they do any more damage, we should ask your opinion.    Do you agree they are doing a good job?     If you vote YES , they will keep at it, closing things down.       In the event of a NO vote, we won’t be able to make them redundant, because it will cost a fortune, so we will put them on a treadmill to generate some energy 🤡”

FORECAST RESULT

YES, KEEP THEM                                         0%

NO, PUT THEM ON THE WHEEL       100%

FORECAST SAVING         £ 7.5 billion.

From now on I will speed up the investigation, before it bores the pants off me 🤡

The ruthless slimming down of Government Departments as recommended by the Last Laugh Looney Party continues at a pace.
Today it is the turn of  the Department of Agriculture,  Fisheries and Food.    In fact that is what it used to be called, when it did what it said on the tin and concentrated on supplying the country with all its food, but now it has had a make-over and is called “ The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs”.

Changing their name is where they started to go wrong.   They must have brought in an expensive management consultant who has got them all confused.    Their mission now is :-   “To restore and enhance the environment for the next generation, and leave it in a better state than we found it”.

                 Whatever happened to the fish and food?

Some estimates say that as much as 80% of our food is imported.   Farming is barely profitable any more and farmers are told to diversify into beekeeping and growing wild flowers.   We are dependent on foreign labour to harvest our fruit and veg.    Our fishing industry has been almost totally destroyed and fish stocks are lower then they have ever been.

It took 3,500 civil servants beavering away at DEFRA in London to do this.   Pursuing their new vision of “purer air, cleaner water, making the land greener, and food more sustainable “.

You couldn’t make this up, but it is all in their Annual Report.    Along with their 25 year annual plan, in which they tell us that in their fight against plastic waste, they will eliminate plastic straws, cotton buds and plastic stirrers.  Thank God for that !

Shame about the floods and the water shortages that they are also responsible for.

The LLLP’s recommended script for a broadcast by Bodj :-

“ We have decided to move all the DEFRA  staff to live in yurts in a field in a flood plain in Yorkshire, where they can learn to live off the land.   They will no longer be paid, but they can keep the TV rights to a weekly Country File broadcast on how well they are getting on.”

FORECAST SAVING   =  £ 2.1 billion.

This is the third Government department investigation by the LLLP  on behalf of Prime Minister Bodj.   All in a effort to get a grip on Government finances in the wake of Coronapop.

The Department of Education review should be straight forward because teachers have to be good about explaining things.     We had to use the 2018/19 Annual Accounts,  because they were late handing in there home work for last year !   Worse still they seem to have copied a lot of the report from other Departments.   Their’s is also full of “world beating” and “cross-cutting” language.   This is not a very good start.

THE FACTS   :-   Total spend was around £ 107 billion.

• total employees ????? Is nowhere to be found
• 3.3 million pupils in secondary school,  4.7 million in primaries.
• 452,000 teachers.  That’s about 16 pupils per teacher which is a lot lower than l thought.     So there must be something wrong with the teachers counting.
  
• £45 billion is core funding for schools.  So where’s all the rest gone.  Perhaps the are not very good at arithmetic at the Department of Education.

LLLP PREJUDICES  :-

• All pupils should be able to read, write and do basic maths before the leave school,  also they need basic IT skills.
• Education standards have fallen over the years
• Educational bureaucracy is tying down teachers
• Teachers should be free to teach and inspire, and be fired if they don’t.
• Universities are full of overpaid part time lecturers and vices chancellors
• Trade Apprenticeships should be grant funded and made equivalent to degrees.

So here is the LLLP script for Bodj’s first TV quiz:-

After an extensive review of their work, I still don’t know what my Department of Education does.     So my question for tonight is :-  “Should I abolish the central Government body altogether and use the money to employ more teachers, give IPads to every pupil and pay down the Coronapop debt ?”

BBC ELECTION FORECAST RESULTS :-

Keep them   —- 5%

Sack them    —— 95%

Projected Coronapop Saving   £ 107 billion.

Thats the end of tonight’s programme, we would like to thank the Secretary of State  — Gavin Williamson —for resigning so quickly🤡e

Saving Britain from bankruptcy is now an urgent task for Prime Minister Bodj.    His squabble of the rabble of Cabinet Ministers, who have proved poor support for Bodj continues.    So now he has turned to the Last Laugh Looney Party to dig him out of the Coronapop financial hole they have got him into.
He will sit back and WAIT for the LLLP to come up with some ideas to get him re-elected as Saviour President of all the UK … forever and ever.

     Endlessly looking through Government Annual Reports will not inform you of very much, it will just wear you down.    Government information is anything but informing.   Even the Office of National Statisticssays as much.
So the LAST LAUGH LOONEY PARTY will adopt a different approach.

Every Friday night Prime Minister Bodj will host a TV programme, which will consult the people on how a Government Department should spend or not spend their (the peoples) money.     Voting will be done live in town halls,  village halls, theatres, pubs, bingo halls and sports stadiums all over the UK.       Everyone will have to be socially distanced or there will  be another surge of Coronapop.     However masks will nor be worn so that voters can be identified.
The results will be feedback instantly and the decisions will  be effective immediately.    Any Departmental redundancies will be handed out in the following week.
The LLLP does not recommend the use of on-line voting because of concerns of Russian or Chinese hacking.    Civil servants will be banned from voting on their own departments expenditure.   Politicians will also be banned from voting on anything, because they have had their chance and failed🤡

Questions for the programmes will be devised by the LLLP after a quick scan though the Depart Annual Reports.   If this leads to any misconceptions, the civil servants will wish they had written clearer reports🤡      There seem to be 18 Departments, although nobody is quite sure.    It is possible that some have got lost in a Cabinet reshuffle.      That means the TV series will last about for four or five months and then we may move to a second series unless the football starts again with spectators instead of cardboard cut-outs.

The first Department to face the Inquisition will be selected by a class of five year olds who are fed up not being at school.     They arbitrarily picked ……THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION.

                         See the first episode in the next post.

As a country we have been spending too much money for far too long.   We are living beyond our means.   The additional debt we have run up to pay for Coronapop now makes it imperative that we get a grip on our finances.  So  Prime Minister Bodj who is currently in hiding, has renamed his Chancellor —- Rushi Hasnomoney.    This heralds a new era of realism.

The Last Laugh Looney Party has been asked to review each Government Department’s expenditure and make some common sense changes.    Oh! and save money and have fun doing it.    Normally an investigation like this could take years, but the LLLP will do it in weeks, without the aid of lawyers or politicians.

We will start with the Ministry of Defence because we all want to stay safe.   So for a start, we will start no more wars like we did in Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya.

LLLP  Guiding principles :-

• Don’t mess with the S A S .
• Aircraft carriers need planes.
• Generally there are too many Generals.
• Real armed forces are armed and on the ground, in the air or at sea.
• Not in offices in Whitehall overspending budgets by £billions.
• We should look after veterans and their families, we owe them a debt for doing our fighting for us.

NOW LETS SEE IF WE CAN FIND SOME FACTS  from an MOD Annual Report :-

This is the command structure, which is quite simple really.

Before you start, you have to understand acronyms.   The report is crammed full of them and they are really well paid for having letters after their names :-

1. CDS. —- Chief of Defence Staff💂‍♂️
2. TLB   —-Top Level Budget Holders  💂‍♀️💂‍♀️💂‍♀️💂‍♀️+  💂‍♀️DIO 💂‍♀️DNO💂‍♀️HOCS
3. ALB. —- Arms Length Bodies 👩‍✈️DECA  💂‍♂️DE&S 💂‍♂️Dsel 💂‍♀️OPA 👩‍✈️SDA 💂‍♀️UKHO 👴 Uncle Tom Cobbley
4. Managed by the 👨🏻‍⚕️DBS, the 🧑‍🎓DIO, the 👨🏻‍⚕️ISS, and the 👮‍♀️MDP
5. Regulated by the 👮‍♀️DSA and the🧑‍🚒SSRO

     HOW DID WE EVER WIN A WAR WITH THIS LOT .????

I did eventually find some figures albeit only for 2018/19  :-

• the total budget was £ 350 billion —— roughly a quarter spent on people, a quarter on equipment, about 30% on capital and the rest ( just around £15,ooo,ooo, ooo) on bits and bobs.
• the remaining 250 pages of coded acronyms and incredibly long sentences that say nothing, are not worth the paper they are printed on.

Between the lines you can see a long tale of programme overruns lasting for years and budget overspends running into £billions.

The Last Laugh Looney Party says 

                   ” WE ARE ARMSLESS AND HARMLESS ! “

So the LLLP recommendation is to bring all our serving troops home and send the Generals with their Whitehall advisers to Syria and Afghanistan to  negotiate a peaceful settlement.   Of course this might take years, but they will be fully equipped with pencils and pens.

So far the LLLP have done a lot of investigating, but not yet saved any money.   Getting to grips with Government Departments is not easy .   The fact is they like spending our money, but they don’t want us to know how they completely fail to control it.

FORECAST :-   Without all  the pen pushers in Whitehall we should be able to save half the budget £ 175 BILLION.

The LAST  LAUGH LOONEY PARTY has started an investigation into Government expenditure, in order to advise Prime Minister Bodj how to get out of the Over half a trillion pound financial hole that his  Chancellor Rushi Havesomemoney has got us into.
This can’t take too long, because there could be a second wave of both Coronapop and seasonal flue .     Then on the advice of Dominic CummingsandGoings the whole Government will have to move to Durham.     Perhaps this is what they mention when they kept referring to the Northern Powerhouse ?

The LLLP investigation started with my previous post on the Department for InterNational Development which is over-ambitiously  charged with solving poverty throughout the world.    Having looked at its Annual Report it doesn’t seem to be doing that, but it is spending loads of our money.   So the LLLP in a radically different approach, has put their ideas for future project work to the people in a survey.      Now we just have to await their verdict.

What the first LLLP investigation also revealed was that Government Annual Reports  are all written to a standard civil service formula.     They are full of praise about how well they are doing, or possibly it is just bull——.       They claim to be transparent, but by providing endless irrelevant details, they are just confusing.   The implication is that their work is too complicated for the average member of the general public who pays for all this to understand.

The LLLP thinks that is nonsense and will find increasingly novel ways to  challenge both the politicians and the civil service machine.   A bit like Dominic 😀

Bodj and his Cabinet Ministers have made a real dogs dinner of handling the Coronapop crisis.     A second wave is coming, but this time it is not just the virus back again, it’s a financial tidal wave.    Rushi Havesomemoney has had no trouble giving our money away, now he has got to claw it all back.    Where on earth is he going to get it from?
Time for some bold, radical solutions.   Time for the Last Laugh Looney Party to think the unthinkable.

We will start with a small Government Department  —- the DFiD—- the Department of International Development.     Something which I have some doubts about.    Evidently so does the Daily Mail, which has a big front page spread on it this week.

The DFiD spends 0.7% of GDP each year.   Is that a lot or a little?     How do you make a judgment?   My prejudice is that it a heck of a lot because Governments always spend a lot.

In fact in 2019/20 their budget was £13.4 billion. 

Here are some more of my other prejudices:-

• we still think we are a super-power saviour of the world, but we are not any more.
• politicians like trips abroad and playing  benefactor with our money.
• we have a lot of problems at home, especially in the aftermath of Coronapop.
• nonetheless we should help with third world poverty.

The DFiD’s  mission is to “eliminate world poverty”, which seems rather ambitious, and “ to promote sustainable development”, which could mean just about anything.     No wonder they a struggling.   In the last year they have got through five Secretary’s of State and now they are being merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

They need to focus on a few issues and make a big and lasting impact.  Rather than throwing our money around like confetti.  Countries with big economies should look after themselves.

LET’S START WITH SOME FACTS.    From the 2019 /20 DFiD annual report.  This should make everything clear, especially when one of their proudly stated aims is “transparency “.    So all I have to do is read 179 pages about what they have been doing with £13.4 billion in the last twelve months :-

• The first clutch pages are introductory waffle, full of glowing testament to how well they are doing.
• Then we have colourful infographics, which are more confusing than helpful.
•  Next we have 10 strategic goals and 6 additional cross-cutting goals.   I hope your still with me.     “Cross-cutting”  sounds like an important word“. It certainly confuses things even more.   
• I am already losing the will to live and I haven’t found out anything useful yet.
• I expect there will be an executive summary soon, because I doubt the general public, whose money they are spending, will have time to read all 179 page.
• Still on we go with the structure of Departments; tables and tables of figures;  more words about wonderful deeds; by country, by region, by policy and by every conceivable sub-division.
• Then the real meat!   How much paper they used; how much water they consumed; how much waste they created and how it was disposed of.   Unbelievably valuable information.   You could be forgiven for thinking they are trying to confuse us.
• It is page 156 before I find any relatively straightforward tables of expenditure by country and by policy.  Even then you have no idea of exactly what the money has been spent on and what has been achieved.
• The DFiD has 3,500 staff all on high salaries and gold plated pensions.  In stark contrast to the people they are supposed to be helping.

I give the report a ZERO for transparency, which is what I suspect they are trying to achieve.    So far the LLLP  has come up with no savings !

I searched around a few other websites and found that very few countries meet the United Nations target of contributing 0.7%  of their GDP.  The European average is about 0.3%.     So how can we be so generous, now that Coronapop has us almost  bankrupt ?

So here’s a Last Laugh Looney Party script for a Bodj BBC broadcast introducing a new proposal for the DDiF :-

We will immediately start a review of all DFiD projects  using the electorate, not the politicians.    Each DFiD project leader, and there are a lot of them, must produce  “a one page justification” of why we should keep spending our money on their project.    The general  public will have one month to vote on which projects they wish to continue to pay for.     After that project funding will cease on projects that received  less than 50% support.
Budget savings will be used to support poverty in the UK and to pay down the Coronapop debt mountain.

  I will  try some other Government Department next and use the same approach with them.